templates

Jan

2011

WordPress Sales Page Template Pack 3

Update: The sale for the WordPress Sales Page Templates is now LIVE and is currently $15.00 for the next FOUR copies.

***

Tomorrow (Friday) I’ll be running a low cost sale for 5 really cool sales page designs in a gorgeous selection of colours. Good looking sales pages are always incredibly handy to have and I’ve paid a lot of money over the years for both custom and generic sales page designs.

And while it’s true that sales copy is the most important aspect of your page, if you combine it with a good sales page design then it will make the difference between a sale or not.

To make this a more attractive proposition, as well as the regular HTML versions of the pages the sale also includes WordPress Page Template Plugin (PTP) versions of the sales page designs.

What this means is you’ll be able to upload the supplied plugin and then select any of the five designs from a drop-down as the template to use for your new WordPress page.

And THAT means you’ll be able to create sales pages on your WordPress site as if they were regular HTML sales pages.

It’s incredibly useful. In fact it’s so useful, that all my sites will soon be driven by WordPress.

The reason for this is it’s far easier to create a sales page using the plugin and a template than it is do it the “old fashioned” way with an HTML template.

And of course any time I want to change the design, I just select a different page template and everything changes except for the sales copy.

Simple.

First a word of warning though, and I know people sometimes don’t take me seriously when I say this.

Until it’s too late…

When the full version of the Unified Page Template Plugin (PTP) is released (we’re very close), then all the template packs we’ve released so far will be set to a standard $27 per design pack or $7 per individual template design.

(We’ll also “retrofit” all the templates you may have purchased, so don’t worry.)

This is your chance to get all five of these designs for just TEN dollars, but only if you’re one of the first 50 to buy.

The sale will start tomorrow Friday 28th 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), with the first 50 copies being at $10.00, the next 25 at $12.50, and 76-100 at $15.00.

After that the template pack will rise to $27.00 until the PTP site is launched.

I do these temporary ultra low prices as a thank you for being a subscriber. 🙂

Here are 60% original size screenshots of the designs. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

-Frank Haywood

For Valda:-

Dec

2010

End Of Year Bonus

Update: The price is now $27.00.

***

My staff have put together a little something for you and the proceeds will go directly into their pockets as their end-of-year bonus.

I didn’t have to do this, but I thought it was a warm gesture at this cold time of year. 🙂

(Well, at least it’s cold in the UK, with sub-zero temperatures down to -8 C and 5 inches of snow outside. Not much by some peoples standards, but it’s the kind of weather that brings the UK almost to a halt.)

What they’ve done for you is to create a set of 5 sales page templates – which I think always come in handy – in both standard HTML and Page Template Plugin format. These aren’t Christmas ones, they’re “regular” sales page templates, very clean looking.

Because we’ve also supplied them with the Page Template Plugin, this means you can easily use them to add sales pages to your blogs.

In case you missed the last update, you can now move the sections of your sales page around just by using short code tags. And today we’ve been talking about how we can also allow you to use this plugin with posts as well as pages, which we’ve been asked about a few times now.

We’re not there yet, but we will be in the new year. Then you’ll have a standard unified plugin that will allow you to add these special format templates to your posts AND pages. 😉

Any of the sales or squeeze page templates you have will all be updated to work with the new plugin when we release it in the new year. It’s messy at the moment, but it will all get better.

Here are 60% original size screenshots of the designs. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

The sale will open Thursday 23rd at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), at just $10.00 for the first 50 sales, rising to $12.50 for the next 50, and then to $27.00 for 100+. As I said above, all proceeds will be shared amongst the staff as their end of year bonus.

I’ll drop you a line about 3-4 hours beforehand to remind you.

Content Replacement Plugin

There’s one other important thing to tell you.

Because the content replacement plugin we released last week has caused so much confusion as to how it works, and also because of clashes with a couple of plugins/themes, we’ve made a bug fix and a few subtle changes to it.

It’s now more intuitive to use, so you should find it works as you expect it to, not as we orginally created it to work. 😉

It made much more sense for us to do this as we seemed to really miss the mark in terms of usage with this one, and for that I apologise.

You now set a start and (optional) end date for the snippet you want to insert in your blog and paste in the short code. The snippet will show as long as it meets the date/time rules for the server.

We’ve also made it so that you can now “stack” them so that as one (or more) expires, others become active either immediately or whenever you set your rule.

It’s much better. Again, I’m sorry for any confusion caused by our initial release.

Sometimes we just get things wrong…

Finally, my apologies as I haven’t been around the last week to reply to blog comments due to minor family illness. I *think* I’m now all up to date and I’ve emailed the people who left me comments trying to get hold of me. 🙂

-Frank Haywood

Dec

2010

Christmas Sales Pages Update

In our never-ending quest to do great stuff that blows your socks off and puts a grin on your face, we’ve updated the WordPress bit of the Christmas Sales Page Templates.

There were two big problems with the original version.

Problem #1 – The elements on the templates were fixed in place.
Problem #2 – The order button had text on it as part of the button graphics.

We’ve now fixed both of those.

Solution #1 – We’ve created short code tags to represent most of the elements on the page.

This means you can now write your sales copy in the main editor, and position the elements wherever you want them within the copy by adding a tag where you want it to appear. 🙂

The short code tags you can use are:-

[product] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of the Product Options fields.

[testimonial-1] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of Comments Options 1.

[testimonial-2] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of Comments Options 2.

[testimonial-3] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of Comments Options 3.

[certificate] – Inserts a certificate graphic with the contents of the Certificate Options fields.

[purchase] – Inserts the order button with the contents of the Purchase Options fields.

[ps] – Inserts the PS detail with the contents of the P.S. Options fields.

[footer-links] – Inserts the footer links or text with the contents of the Footer field.

[br] – Inserts a single line break and is incredibly useful as the WordPress editor (TinyMCE) will strip out extra breaks in visual mode editing.

That last one was a spark of brilliance from the plugin developer and I’ve asked if we can have it included in the next version of Big Ed too.

You’ll notice that the exception/exclusion with the above tags is the Header Option.

It has to be at the top and will break the appearance of the page if we tried to make it movable.

This means you can now do things like create your page sales copy so it looks something like this:-

———————
[br][br][product]

Yes! That’s right! You can… blah, blah, blah.

[testimonial-1]

This enables you to… blah, blah, blah.

[certificate]

[testimonial-2]

So why delay? Order now!

[purchase]

Closing text… blah, blah, blah.

[ps]

[testimonial-3]

[purchase]

[footer-links]
———————

Note that the [purchase] tag has been used twice so that you can put the order button in its regular place and also at the bottom for those people who go straight down to look for the price.

Cool huh?

Solution #2 – Alexandra L wrote to us to say that as a French speaker she wanted a method of changing the text on the order button or for us to supply the blank graphics.

D’oh!

Fixed. So now you can do that too.

We’ve added a new Purchase Option called “Purchase Button Text”. Any text you enter into that field will appear like magic on the order button. No graphical editing required.

😉

The text itself appears to be embedded into the button and part of the button graphic (done with CSS I think), so again it’s another bit of brilliance from the designer and developer.

…

The result of these two changes means great looking sales page designs which anyone can use on any of their WordPress blogs without really needing to know anything about HTML.

Just upload, activate and add sales copy.

The only thing we can’t make easier for you is the sales copy. It’s a skill you *need* to learn for yourself. Practice makes perfect.

…

The plugin isn’t perfect yet and there are a few inconsistencies such as the short code tags not matching the option description, but we’ll fix that with the next release. I wanted to get it out to you ASAP while it’s still leading up to Christmas. 😉

Just go back to your personal download page (you DID bookmark it, right?) and grab the zip.

What you’ll find when you upload and activate it is that the page looks EMPTY when you first select a template and publish.

Don’t forget (like I did) that you need to add all the short code tags in your page editor before they show. Ahem. 😉

…

Finally, Multiple Streams Themes 4 and the squeeze page templates that went on sale on Friday now have just a few copies left at the $12.50 price point, so they’re still quite cheap if you don’t already have them.

Probably the next release of the Page Template Plugin will incorporate both squeeze and sales page functionality and you’ll be able to choose between the two with templates being optional extras.

Have fun…

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

Christmas Sales Page Plugin…

Update: The sale for this plugin and template pack is now live at $10 for the first 100 copies and you can purchase using the button below.

ALL GONE at $10, now at $17.

***

Update: I’ve just created this short(ish) video to show you how the plugin works with the Christmas sales page templates.

[mc id=”1078″ type=”video”]WordPress Page Templates Early tour[/mc]

***

I know I’ve been quiet this last week, and that’s because I’ve been working with two of my staff to create something REALLY special.

It’s something that WordPress should have as part of its core, but doesn’t.

And we think what we’ve done is revolutionary.

Bear with me while I explain. Trust me, you’re going to have one of those “aha moments” really soon… 😉

First a bit of background.

One of my hugely popular products can be found at:-

http://www.WPAffiliatePages.com/

The product explains how you can turn any sales page into a WordPress page template, and it’s pretty good (ahem). It took me two years to discover how to do it (by accident) and it will take you just a few minutes to learn how to do it too.

(By the way I’ve dropped the price from $27 to $10 for a few days, so if you don’t already have it, now would be a good time to get it. It says $27 on the sales page, but when you click the order button you’ll see it’s $10 when you get to PayPal.)

From feedback about that product, I realised that what people REALLY wanted was a nice easy way to add pre-done sales pages to WordPress.

i.e. Someone supplies great looking sales pages, and there’s a simple way to add them to WordPress.

And there’s the problem.

You see there’s no simple way of adding page templates to WordPress that interact with it properly. Even my very popular method works outside the WordPress “loop”…

Think about how page templates work now.

You activate a theme, and you find there’s only one page template. Two if you’re lucky.

And even though I’ve been changing that with the Multiple Streams Themes (MST) and adding a variety of page templates to give you more control over the look and feel of your blog – it’s not an ideal way to do it.

Think about it.

You set up great looking and unique pages on your blog, decide to change / update your theme, and suddenly all your pages default back to the one standard page template supplied with the new theme. (The laughable thing is, it happened to me today.)

All that gorgeousness lost in an instant.

Until now…

I’ve had one of my plugin developers and my graphics guru working together to come up with both an end-user PLUGIN and developer/designer methodology for creating “sticky” page templates.

So when you change themes, your custom designed pages remain UNCHANGED.

And here it is, that moment I promised you earlier…

Aha!

Even better is I’m releasing the plugin and methodology for free. 🙂

But… Don’t get the wrong end of the stick and please don’t get confused about what this plugin does. And I’ll explain in a bit more detail.

It allows graphics designers and developers to create specially formatted page templates.

These special page templates then work hand in hand with the plugin which adds easy to use option fields where you can add detail like pre-header, header, autoresponder sign up code etc, just by entering the data into boxes on the page editor.

You then add your body page content as normal using the HTML or visual editor, select one of these special page templates and publish your page.

When you view the page on the front of your blog, it looks completely different to the design on the rest of your blog.

If you decide you don’t like the design or it’s not appropriate for the content, you just select another one and update the page – there’s no need to change any of the content or other fields.

The page on the front of your blog changes appearance when you refresh. 🙂

And because it’s a plugin working outside the active WP theme, it doesn’t matter if you change or update your theme.

Your pages will still look the same as the day you published them.

Ta-daa!

We think it will revolutionise the way that page templates are created using WordPress, and that more people will be inclined to use WordPress as a sales and promotional platform.

Yep, we believe that by doing this we’ve opened up WordPress to a market that’s always been there, but has never had the right tool to do the job.

So when and what am I going to distribute?

Tomorrow, Wednesday 1st December, I’ll be releasing this new plugin together with a 5 pack of sales page templates in jolly old Christmas designs – snowmen, holly, Christmas trees, etc.

All 5 of the designs will be supplied in both standard HTML and the new WP Page Template plugin format.

The plugin is free and always will be, the 5 pack of templates will be $10 for the first 100 buyers – now $17 – and then the price goes up – this is a special subscribers only price. I don’t think it’s a good idea to waste any time hanging around with this one.

Here are 60% original size screenshots of the designs. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

The sale will open tomorrow at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), and I’ll drop you a line about 3-4 hours beforehand to remind you.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. PLAhh.com members will receive their second months product (December) tomorrow, so also watch out for an announcement about that.